Then the Mongols invaded, and after that came the Ming empire. And the Ming were quite the opposite of the Song. They wanted tight, centralized control of everything. They literally controlled where you could travel, and they needed a report from every merchant on how much stock he held in his warehouse at regular intervals. This was a recipe for... See more

Decline set in instead over the course of Mongol rule. While the Chinese market economy did not collapse, the serious damage inflicted during the Mongol conquest, the burden of ill-fated major invasions of Japan and Vietnam, ruinous inflation in the paper currency and a system of official discrimination against southern Chinese all contributed to... See more